The above picture, described by Sheriff Ruckston as a ‘childish’ action, was shown as evidence during the trial. We republish it here for information purposes only.
I’m sure you can remember 2010 well.
The World Cup. Lady Gaga’s ‘meat dress’. The Chilean miners.
I mostly remember it as the year when the police got into a habit of arresting myself and a lot of my friends on whatever shaky grounds they could stumble upon.
Finally, today, one chapter of that came to a close. In a stunning verdict that probably did not shake the foundations of Scottish law to its core, this morning a Glasgow courtroom ruled that taking things from bins isn’t a crime (especially if they can’t prove it even came from a bin). As far from groundbreaking as this may have been, it was nonetheless significant for me – because for the past 31 months I’ve stood accused of exactly that, facing court proceedings – and initially, draconian bail conditions – because it was alleged that I ‘thieved’ a banner from some BNP supporters in central Glasgow all the way back in September 2010.
After a trial which – somehow, given the scant prosecution case – lasted four days, totalling about a dozen court appearances over the past 30 months, the allegations against me – of ‘Breach of the Peace’ and ‘Theft’ were finally found to be not proven. The former charge is famous for meaning everything and nothing – what the cops throw at you when they don’t have anything else to go on. In this instance it included allegations that I assaulted Joe Finnie, the Glasgow BNP organiser at the time, by ‘punching, kicking and spitting’ on him, organised a riotous street assembly which overturned their stall and ‘scattered leaflets’ across Buchanan Street, wrestled with BNP members for possession of their banner and, this is where it gets serious, shouted and swore. In the end, despite lots of tedious testimony from (mostly ex who dont talk to each other anymore) BNP members that they couldn’t remember much but they definitely had seen me doing all these things, the entire case came down to whether I’d er, shouted and swore. Did I say ‘scum’? Or shout ‘smash the BNP’? And is that tantamount to Breach of the Peace? Or was I – by not clearly disassociating myself from the crowd, who the defence conceded some of whom had ‘breached the peace’ – acting in common purpose with them, therefore accepting some liability for what unfolded?
NOT LAUGHING NOW YOU PARROT: the Scottish BNP website in 2010. Can you tell they were a wee bit obsessed?
In the end, Sheriff Ruckston ruled that there was no way of proving my role in these offences. In fact, most of the BNP’s shaky handheld camera footage showed me ‘standing calmly or walking away’ while the confrontation was at its peak. As for the theft of the banner: while the Sheriff dismissed defence testimony that it was found in a bin (it actually was lol), the BNP witnesses case that I’d wrestled it from them was also dismissed. With nothing else to go on, there was no way of proving how the banner had come to feature in the photograph above, thus the not proven verdict.
The original context in this: in September 2010 the BNP were riding high. The previous year they’d had two MEPs elected in the north of England, Griffin had been on Question Time that autumn, and their membership was continuing to grow. Their desperate attempts to gain a foothold north of the border had continually been met with vociferous street opposition, particularly throughout their general election campaign that May. On 18 September 2010, they set out for a ‘national day of action’. Anti-fascists soon spotted them on Buchanan Street and there was – as was standard – a rapid mobilisation to oppose them. I happened to be there first, at least visibly so. The rest is history: the BNP filmed me on my phone and subsequently tried to pin everything that happened next on me, cause I obviously must be behind it all.
When a picture emerged the following day of the banner that had been adorning their stall in the hands of red commie marxist scum’, the neo-Nazi blogosphere went into overdrive. “REDS HUMILIATE GRIFFINITE BNP GLASGOW CLOWNS” screamed Stormfront, as an alphabet soup of different far-right sects tried to blame everyone but themselves for the collective embarrassment of there being a picture of a bunch of teenagers posing with a BNP banner on the internet. As well as their comic efforts to identify those pictured (who is Nicola?!??!), the BNP busied themselves with writing letters to my MP, my dad, the SSP, my university, the cops etc warning them about the dangerous terrorist in their midst (me). Full run down laughing at the fascist keyboard fantasists here.
Student protest in Glasgow, November 2010
Then Millbank happened. If it hadn’t been for the student demonstrations that erupted across the UK in November 2010, in all likelihood no charges would ever have been brought. But for Strathclyde Police, nervous about how the emerging street movement against austerity, from UK Uncut to the wave of university occupations, was developing, the opportunity to start nailing charges against any activists they could was too good to miss. And so it began – with the ‘Gangs Taskforce’ based at Baird Street Police Station leading the charge.
So it was mid-November 2010, two months after the incident, when I initially got charged with the BNP banner case, bailed until Christmas Eve with conditions that meant I wasn’t allowed to step foot in a city-centre exclusion zone (a rectangle roughly bordering the M8/Renfrew Street/High Street/The Clyde) between 9am and 9pm. Under the pretence of ‘keeping me out of trouble’, this was a pretty handy way of preventing my attendance at any of the student demonstrations which were continuing to cause chaos (mostly for the cops) at regular intervals in the city centre, with hundreds of student charging about on unauthorised marches. I heard they were pretty fun anyway, as I was mostly stuck at home watching them unfold on the internet. Obviously concerned at me missing out on all this, during one of these demos they even showed up at my door just to check I was in! Just for my own safety, naturally.
the upturned BNP stall.
It would be another year before I heard anything regarding the BNP case – a year being the length of time a case stays ‘live’ for and in which prosecution proceedings need be brought during. Just weeks before it would’ve expired, a letter came through the post with a fresh court date. The story since then has been one of endless adjournments and false-starts due to any number of circumstances – PCS strikes (!), missing evidence, faulty DVDS… you name it. Finally in mid-April we did get going.
Today, the fourth day of the trial, it finally concluded, with the Sheriff ruling that due to the unreliability of the prosecution witness testimony and video footage which didn’t really show me doing much except standing about, it wasn’t possible to prove either offence.
It’s significant not just as a massive GIRUY to the BNP but also as a political victory over the Procurator Fiscals office, who made a conscious decision in autumn 2011 to pursue these charges rather than allowing the case to expire. Similarly a guilty verdict, which would have been based on that by standing around in the vicinity, I was acting in ‘common purpose’ with those who we accepted were committing a breach of the peace, would have set a dangerous precedent for protests, both anti-fascist and otherwise. It’s significant because binraking/anti-fascism is not a crime, it’s a SOCIAL DUTY.
I saw the footage. I honestly welled up with pride when I saw the whole street chanting them out.